Cocoa Beach Read online

  I lift my left hand—and I’m surprised by the effort this takes, as if someone’s attached a ten-pound weight to my wrist—and open the folded paper.

  But it’s not a note, after all. Would you believe it? There are no words. No message of any kind, unless you consider that a stranger’s perfect sketch of your daughter, playing in the sand, her snub-nosed profile almost photographic in its uncanny resemblance to Evelyn, constitutes a message. The bile rises in my throat. I close the paper and start to crumple it in my fist, hoping that the dozing Clara hasn’t noticed this little exchange, and that’s when I see the small block letters running across the bottom edge of the back of the page, so even and regular as to appear almost typewritten.

  Evelyn looks up at me, squinting her hazel eyes against the sun, and her expression, for an instant, recalls her father to my heart.

  “Mama?” She tugs the end of my skirt.

  “Just a moment, darling.”

  I crouch on the sand and tuck the sketch into my pocketbook, and as I do this, swift and discreet, I smooth away the wrinkles at the bottom of the page and read: regarding your husband. flamingo tea garden. 11 p.m.

  “Something the matter?” asks Clara. Her eyes are open now; she’s watching me fiddle with the pocketbook. On her face rests an expression of such sleepy, blinking, content curiosity, I’m reminded of a kitten.

  “Nothing at all,” I say. “But I think it’s time to go back to the hotel for a rest, don’t you?”

  I have a photograph of the house on Cocoa Beach, taken just before the fire. I’m staring at it now, as I lie alone on my narrow single bed in the Flamingo Hotel, while Evelyn sleeps in her little room next door and Clara attends a little party downstairs. We were both invited by no less a figure than Mrs. Fisher herself, the wife of Mr. Carl Fisher, who—as you know—owns this hotel and the beach casino and most of Miami Beach, really. But I pleaded a headache, so Clara went to the party on her own.

  And now here I am. Staring at a photograph while the clock just ticks and ticks, ten o’clock drawing inevitably toward eleven.

  This house, you see, is important. And yet it’s not the importance of the house that matters to me, at this precise moment, but its beauty. When I first pulled the photograph free from its envelope, I couldn’t quite believe that a house like that could possibly belong to Simon, that he could have approved its design and made himself at home there, right on the edge of the great, tempestuous Atlantic, in a villa plucked from some lazy Mediterranean shore. The roof of red tile, the inner courtyard anchored in place by a central fountain, the trees of lemon and eucalyptus, the wide windows and the simple lines: they aren’t anything like—for example—Simon’s ancient family seat in Cornwall, which he loved so much that he was willing to do anything to keep it. Anything at all.

  But then I thought—as I gazed and closed my eyes and opened them to gaze again—I thought that maybe the simple, sunbaked beauty of this house made sense after all. Maybe the new architecture of this house represented a change in the architecture of Simon himself, or rather a reflection of Simon’s true architecture, instead of the one I had imagined these past three years. Maybe I had been wrong after all. Maybe I had been unjust and fearful. Maybe some other explanation existed for the dark events in Cornwall that spring.

  Or maybe not. But the sight of that photograph gave me reason to wonder. Gives me reason to wonder now, in my room at the Flamingo Hotel, as I examine its monochrome details once more. To remember the way I once felt about Simon, the way I once loved and trusted him, because while a man can lie in his words and his kisses, his letters and his embraces, he can’t lie about the house that he lives in.

  Or can he?

  The clock ticks. 10:51.

  Chapter 8

  Paris, August 1917

  I remember another occasion I encountered that sensation of being watched. I was in Paris with Hazel, some months after I met Simon, and we had just entered a café in the avenue de l’Opéra with a pair of English officers, when I thought somebody’s gaze found me, like a hand on my neck.

  At the time, I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. I was in Paris, for heaven’s sake! An ocean away from my previous life, a lifetime away from the secrets of my childhood. And the place was as jam-packed as any midday New York sidewalk, a favorite spot for soldiers on leave. You could hear the din halfway down the street, and inside, the atmosphere crackled with khaki and laughter and clinking glass, the smell of wine and cigarettes, the unnatural high-pitched gaiety of wartime. Nobody cared who you were inside that café, in the middle of Armageddon. Nobody paid us any attention. Not the slightest glance.

  But I couldn’t shrug it off: a pair of eyes on the back of my head, on my throat and arms and legs simultaneously. Not suspicious or even curious. Only watchful.

  We found a table, I don’t know how. Bribery, maybe. Our escorts—two sub-lieutenants, pathetically young, Johnson and someone else whose name I couldn’t remember—greeted the maître d’ like old friends, the kind whose generous palms make up for their excruciating schoolboy French. The tablecloth was yellowed and dirty, the glasses filmy. The café had no fresh meat, only sausages. The waiter was old and philosophical, and spread his hands before us: C’est la guerre.

  “Of course,” said Lieutenant Johnson. “Long live sausages. As long as the wine’s still running, I’ll eat whatever you’ve got.”

  Hazel laughed—not the kind of laugh she used to make at the hospital, but a new one, higher-pitched and sort of fragile, as if the sound of it might shatter when you flicked it invisibly with your finger. Because Hazel had already drunk a lot of wine, you see, and so had Lieutenant Johnson and his nameless friend. I didn’t dare. At the time, I had hardly ever sipped any wine at all. Mother drank it often, after Sophie was born, glass after glass in the armchair in the parlor while I played with the baby in the nursery, and the sight and smell of wine always left me feeling ill and nervous. Brought on the familiar shroud of black dread. Something terrible was going to happen.

  Hazel went on laughing. She wasn’t troubled by dread. She had grown up in a nice middle-class brownstone in the East Eighties with a German cook and an Irish maid and five or six siblings, all watched over tenderly by a father in the insurance business and a mother who belonged to several charity committees. She reached confidently for the bottle of wine in the center of the table—it was that kind of establishment, you poured your own wine—and topped up Johnson’s glass and then her own. Then the other lieutenant, who sat next to me—Green! That was his name!—and when she turned at last to my glass, she said, “Why, Virginia, you’re not drinking your wine! For shame!”

  “Drink your wine, like a good girl,” said Lieutenant Green.

  “Yes, do,” said Hazel. “We’re celebrating, after all. Free of old DeForest at last! Long live the American service. Jolly times ahead!”

  Well, I nearly laughed at that one, anyway. Virginia Fortescue, jolly. The idea! Besides, who was to say that the American service wouldn’t be just as oppressive as Mrs. DeForest’s volunteer hospital, and probably less well run? But the United States had entered the war in the spring, and here we were in Paris, Hazel and me, transferring into the newborn U.S. Army Ambulance Service now headquartered in the hospital in Neuilly. No more châteaux, no more British patients and British doctors, no more searching of faces at every stop, hoping and dreading what you might find. Which was all for the best, of course. Wasn’t this the reason I’d accepted Hazel’s offer to begin with? Tendered my resignation to Mrs. DeForest? To remove myself from any possibility of contact. To slice myself off from the source of this strange, stubborn infatuation that refused, like some kind of suppurating wound, to close itself and heal.

  Instead of laughing, I lifted my shoulders and told her I didn’t like wine.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Green. “You don’t have to like it, after all. You only have to drink it.”

  Everyone laughed at that, even me. Nothing more awkward than not laughing al
ong. I picked up my glass and pretended to sip, and when nobody was looking I switched my glass with Lieutenant Green’s, and at that instant I felt him again: my unknown watchman, as if his palm lay flat between the blades of my shoulders.

  But I don’t think Green noticed the maneuver at all, and even if he did, he wasn’t going to complain. Unlike me, Green and Johnson were out for a determined jolly time tonight, five days of coveted Paris leave—ooh la la—and Hazel and I were only the start of it.

  “You remember Lieutenant Johnson, don’t you? He spent a week with us last March, convalescing from trench foot,” Hazel had said that afternoon as we changed into our evening clothes, such as they were. (She said the word Lieutenant in the English way, gluing an invisible and inexplicable f to the end of the first syllable.) The hotel, tucked in a respectable corner of Neuilly—was there any other kind?—smelled of cigarettes and camphor. I guess this kept the insects away. Hazel and I shared a miniature double room on the attic floor, looking down gloriously on the Bois de Boulogne from a dirty mansard window, which we kept open because of the heat.

  “Not really. I only see the patients for a moment or two.”

  “Oh, right. Of course you do. Well, I’m sure you’ll love him. Dashing fellow. He’s bringing a friend.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “I don’t know. A friend! A nice English gentleman, I’m sure. You can trust these English boys; they’re not like the ones back home, all hands and promises and more hands. You know what I mean.”

  “Naturally.”

  She turned her back to me, so I could do up her buttons, and lifted her hair from her shoulders. “Please be nice to him, Virginia. The friend, I mean.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I need him to like you, Virginia. Do you know what I mean? Please.”

  I concentrated on my fingers, maneuvering buttons into small, delicate holes, enclosing the soft, young skin of Hazel’s back, and I found myself wondering whose fingers would slide those buttons out again. What fate lay waiting for Hazel’s soft skin, in the hours ahead, if I did as she asked. If I was nice to Lieutenant Green.

  I fastened the last button and patted the edge of her dress. “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter whether I was nice to Lieutenant Green or not. He was determined to like me, in the same way Johnson was determined to like Hazel, and she was determined to like him. Because if you couldn’t actually fall in love in the space of a Paris evening in wartime, you could at least do yourself the favor of pretending to fall in love, to experience all the bedazzlement of love without the usual entanglement. Because your nerves and your chemistry didn’t know the difference, did they?

  And the restaurant was dark and hazy, and the air was warm and pungent with tobacco, and Johnson had a sharp, neat profile and Green wore a smile on his pink young face: a smile that grew broader as the evening wore on. I shrugged away the imaginary palm between my shoulder blades and thought—defiantly—I will enjoy myself. After the sausages, the waiter brought out four small, pale custards and a bottle of old Muscat—for the English soldiers and the pretty American girls, he said—and Johnson poured the wine and said, Ah, that’s the stuff and closed his eyes in rapture, or else in agony. Hazel looped her arm around his elbow and leaned a dreamy head against his shoulder. Underneath the rim of the table, Lieutenant Green’s hand touched mine, where I was certain nobody could possibly see him.

  Nobody at all.

  At some point the café closed abruptly. Curfew. Everybody spilled out the doors into the twilight while the lamps shut off, one by one. There were no taxis. The Métro, out of respect for the rules, was also shut down. C’est la guerre.

  So we walked along the nearby Seine. The boats were dark, the cobblestones oily after an evening cloudburst. The air hung around us in an unfathomable black cloud, and you could hear the laughter of couples taking advantage of this strange privacy in the middle of war-darkened Paris. You could smell the wet reek of the river, the ozone, the perfume of someone’s soap. A motor ambulance roared by, streaking the riverbank with unexpected light, and somebody shrieked and giggled. Ahead of me, Hazel’s face shone for an instant, turned not toward her lieutenant but toward the nearby street and the disappearing ambulance.

  Then the light was gone.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, in a very loud whisper.

  “Wherever you like,” said Lieutenant Johnson.

  Suggested Green: “To the hotel?”

  “Which hotel?”

  “Ours, I think.”

  “Oooh, that sounds lovely,” sang Hazel.

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d rather not. I’m tired, and we’re not supposed to be out at all, after curfew, are we? The Germans still fire off shells into Paris, during the night.”

  We had come to a stop. Still too dark to see one another’s faces, but you could pick out the shapes, if you tried. The nearly indiscernible shadows, the snatches of electric, drunken breath, the wisps of heat drifting from beneath our clothes. Lieutenant Green’s hand brushed mine. More confident, now. Single-minded. A hand bent on a certain goal.

  “Shall we sit, then?” said Johnson.

  “Oh, yes! Let’s sit.” Hazel moved away, toward the river, and we mingled after her until we reached the stone edge of the quayside and lowered ourselves to the ground, one by one, legs dangling above the restless water. Hazel sat on my left, but Johnson was closer on my right, so close that our legs lay side by side, pressed into one. Our clasped hands rested at the seam. His palm stuck to mine in a thin film of perspiration—his or mine, I wasn’t sure—and as we sat there, the four of us, separated into pairs by those few extra inches of space between me and Hazel, trying to think of something to say, I felt it again: the warmth on my neck, the weight against my spine.

  A pair of eyes, somewhere nearby, in the Paris night.

  “So then,” said Green. “Let’s see. What do you think of Paris?”

  I couldn’t see his face, but I knew how he must look. Fresh and round-faced and fair, his skin spotted red from the wine. Rather nice-looking. Hopeful eyes of English china blue, pale eyelashes that were nevertheless thick. A sloping forehead, mopped with disobedient young hair, and a pair of damp palms.

  “I love Paris,” I said.

  “Good, good.”

  His fingers crawled against mine. On my other side, Hazel and her lieutenant murmured and giggled. The river went rush, rush below my feet, and somewhere in the center of the current a barge slid by, dark and lugubrious, its few lights shaded. Green’s face turned in to my cheek.

  “So then. Do you think—”

  I tore my hand away and jumped to my feet. “I’m sorry, I must be going!”

  “Virginia!” exclaimed Hazel.

  Lieutenant Green, thrown off-balance by my movements, tried to stagger to his feet, but something went wrong—maybe it was the wine—and he staggered the wrong way, hovered like a dancer for a second or two, and toppled into the Seine.

  Like a coward, I bolted away.

  I fled without thought, and when I stopped, panting, a few minutes later, I had no idea where I stood. Paris was so curiously black, its monumental buildings reflecting only the faintest amount of moon, the thinnest streaks of golden lamplight from behind a million curtains. Who knew a city could become so dark and so still? Not a soul on the sidewalks, except me.

  I had no map, only the plan of Paris in my head, like the web of a spider. I had inherited that much from my father—his orderly mind, his ability to conceive how something went together, like a three-dimensional model suspended within his brain. Strut A connected into plate B. I balanced on a corner, gazing at the massive shadow of the building across the street, the silver points where the moon touched its skin, the glimmer against a wrought iron balcony, and tried to summon my logic.

  I could wait for a gendarme to pass by, and beg for directions.
/>   I could knock upon a nearby door.

  I could return to the river, and the scene of my shame, and make sure that Lieutenant Green was all right.

  My veins throbbed. My feet ached in their new shoes. The air was humid and August-warm, and a trickle of perspiration began at the edge of my scalp and fell slowly down my temple. You must do something, Virginia, you must act, I thought, and as I repeated the word act in my head, I thought I heard a footstep on the pavement behind me.

  And another.

  Another.

  Too slow for a gendarme, I thought—not in words, the idea was too swift and instinctual—too slow for good works.

  I stepped off the curb and darted across the street, up the long avenue—I now saw it in my head, yes, superimposed against the map of Paris, an important spoke in the wheel that sprang from the Arc de Triomphe, the Porte Maillot near which our hotel stood—up the long avenue at a flat run. The heel of my right shoe caught against my foot. The five toes screamed into their narrow triangle. Just another corner, I thought, just another street and I’ll stop.

  But when I reached the next corner, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t hear the footsteps pounding behind me, but I felt them in my ribs. I felt the stare of someone’s omnivorous eyes on my spine and my skull, scouring out the secrets inside, and I thought my lungs would burst from my chest. The thick Paris air choked my throat. On I ran, aiming only at the next street, at the next corner, at the curbs that caught my ankle as I crossed them, and my mind turned white, my scalp burned, my limbs went numb.

  A shadow appeared ahead, detaching itself from the long, irregular row of buildings and café awnings. Shaped like a man, broad and slope-shouldered, wearing a peaked cap.